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** The original model of human evolution, that the brain became advanced first and the body shifted to serve it (e.g. bipedalism as a consequence of using the hands to manipulate objects), was being systematically torn down with every new human ancestor discovered ''except'' Piltdown Man, which makes sense given a hoax is usually going to conform to the ideas of the time regardless of truth. After its "discovery" it was considered a clinching counter-example, but the reason it was finally re-examined decades later was that by then it was the only one. The theory is supported, along with Piltdown Man, in the BMovie ''Film/TheNeanderthalMan'', released just five months before Piltdown Man was definitely exposed as a hoax. It is also the apparent basis of the prologue to ''Film/TwoThousandOneASpaceOdyssey'' (though WordOfGod is that they intended to depict the man-apes as bipedal, but made them quadrupedal in order to avoid MaleFrontalNudity).
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** The original model of human evolution, that the brain became advanced first and the body shifted to serve it (e.g. bipedalism as a consequence of using the hands to manipulate objects), was being systematically torn down with every new human ancestor discovered ''except'' Piltdown Man, which makes sense given a hoax is usually going to conform to the ideas of the time regardless of truth.Man. After its "discovery" it was considered a clinching counter-example, but the reason it was finally re-examined decades later was that by then it was the only one. The theory is supported, along with Piltdown Man, in the BMovie ''Film/TheNeanderthalMan'', released just five months before Piltdown Man was definitely exposed as a hoax. It is also the apparent basis of the prologue to ''Film/TwoThousandOneASpaceOdyssey'' (though WordOfGod is that they intended to depict the man-apes as bipedal, but made them quadrupedal in order to avoid MaleFrontalNudity).
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Examples of DatedHistory that predate the birth of the oldest civilizations.
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Examples of DatedHistory that predate the birth of reference events predating the oldest civilizations.
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Examples of DatedHistory that predate the birth of the oldest civilizations.
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* Both ''[[Recap/FuturamaS6E8ThatDarnKatz Futurama]]'' and ''Series/CSICrimeSceneInvestigation'' (in [[Recap/CSIS2E20CatsInTheCradle an episode]] about the [[AlwaysMurder murder]] of a CrazyCatLady) reference the once CommonKnowledge that cats were first domesticated in UsefulNotes/AncientEgypt. However, in the mid-[=2000s=] archaeologists found evidence that cats had been domesticated in the Levant thousand of years before they were in Egypt.
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* Both ''[[Recap/FuturamaS6E8ThatDarnKatz Futurama]]'' and ''Series/CSICrimeSceneInvestigation'' (in [[Recap/CSIS2E20CatsInTheCradle an episode]] about the [[AlwaysMurder murder]] of a CrazyCatLady) reference the once CommonKnowledge that cats were first domesticated in UsefulNotes/AncientEgypt. However, in the mid-[=2000s=] archaeologists found evidence that cats had been domesticated in the Levant thousand thousands of years before they were in Egypt.
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** The original model of human evolution, that the brain became advanced first and the body shifted to serve it (e.g. bipedalism as a consequence of using the hands to manipulate objects), was being systematically torn down with every new human ancestor discovered ''except'' Piltdown Man. After its "discovery" it was considered a clinching counter-example, but the reason it was finally re-examined decades later was that by then it was the only one. The theory is supported, along with Piltdown Man, in the BMovie ''Film/TheNeanderthalMan'', released just five months before Piltdown Man was definitely exposed as a hoax. It is also the apparent basis of the prologue to ''Film/TwoThousandOneASpaceOdyssey'' (though WordOfGod is that they intended to depict the man-apes as bipedal, but made them quadrupedal in order to avoid MaleFrontalNudity).
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** The original model of human evolution, that the brain became advanced first and the body shifted to serve it (e.g. bipedalism as a consequence of using the hands to manipulate objects), was being systematically torn down with every new human ancestor discovered ''except'' Piltdown Man.Man, which makes sense given a hoax is usually going to conform to the ideas of the time regardless of truth. After its "discovery" it was considered a clinching counter-example, but the reason it was finally re-examined decades later was that by then it was the only one. The theory is supported, along with Piltdown Man, in the BMovie ''Film/TheNeanderthalMan'', released just five months before Piltdown Man was definitely exposed as a hoax. It is also the apparent basis of the prologue to ''Film/TwoThousandOneASpaceOdyssey'' (though WordOfGod is that they intended to depict the man-apes as bipedal, but made them quadrupedal in order to avoid MaleFrontalNudity).
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Splitting hairs; not really history even compared to the loosely fit statement that precedes it
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* While it was once generally believed that Europe's Mesolithic "Western Hunter-Gatherers" were displaced by "Early European Farmers" in the Neolithic, genetic studies have painted a more complex picture. There does seem to have been an initial displacement, but the evidence says that after the initial expansion, the two groups co-existed side by side for centuries with ongoing gradual admixture.
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* A popular belief in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries was that Europeans could be divided into two groups: "fair" Europeans from the north, known for rationality, intelligence, hard work, and integrity, and "swarthy" Europeans from the south, known for laziness, dishonesty, greed, and stupidity. [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism Scientific racists]] later subdivided the swarthy Europeans into Mediterraneans and Alpines, the first of which was said to be creatively BrilliantButLazy and shiftless, and the second stupid, plodding peasants. Despite the skepticism of mainstream anthropologists and historians, the Nordic "master race" theory became a cornerstone of Nazism. Less horrifically, it also shows up in much of the fiction of the time: ''Franchise/ConanTheBarbarian'' might be the best-known example. Of course, we now know that Nordicism is bunk: not only do we now know that "Nordics" did not arise in Scandinavia (which was the last area of Continental Europe to be peopled), but also that the various "fair" Northern Europeans aren't particularly closely related to each other. Skin color and pigmentation variations are recent and can't be used to indicate relatedness. Case in point, black Africans were once all lumped together as being essentially the same, with the exception of obvious outliers like the Khoisan and African pygmies; genetic studies have since shown that they're far more heterogenous (biologically speaking) than previously thought, certainly moreso than Europeans.
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* A popular belief in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries was that Europeans could be divided into two groups: "fair" Europeans from the north, known for rationality, intelligence, hard work, and integrity, and "swarthy" Europeans from the south, known for laziness, dishonesty, greed, and stupidity. [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism Scientific racists]] later subdivided the swarthy Europeans into Mediterraneans and Alpines, the first of which was said to be creatively BrilliantButLazy and shiftless, and the second stupid, plodding peasants. Despite the skepticism of mainstream anthropologists and historians, the Nordic "master race" theory became a cornerstone of Nazism. Less horrifically, it also shows up in much of the fiction of the time: ''Franchise/ConanTheBarbarian'' might be the best-known example. Of course, we now know that Nordicism is bunk: not only do we now know that "Nordics" did not arise in Scandinavia (which was the last area of Continental Europe to be peopled), but also that the various "fair" Northern Europeans aren't particularly closely related to each other. Skin color and pigmentation variations are recent and can't be used to indicate relatedness. Case in point, black Africans were once all lumped together as being essentially the same, with the exception of obvious outliers like the Khoisan and African pygmies; genetic studies have since shown that they're far more heterogenous (biologically speaking) than previously thought, certainly moreso than Europeans.
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whatever
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* While it was once generally believed that Europe's Mesolithic "Western Hunter-Gatherers" were displaced by "Early European Farmers" in the Neolithic, genetic studies have painted a more complex picture. There does seem to have been an initial displacement, but the evidence says that after the initial expansion, the two groups co-existed side by side for centuries with ongoing gradual admixture.
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Sounds like splitting hairs. At the end of the day there was displacement.
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* While it was once generally believed that Europe's Mesolithic "Western Hunter-Gatherers" were displaced by "Early European Farmers" in the Neolithic, genetic studies have painted a more complex picture. There does seem to have been an initial displacement, but the evidence says that after the initial expansion, the two groups co-existed side by side for centuries with ongoing gradual admixture.
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** Her interpretation of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurgan_hypothesis Kurgan hypothesis]] linguistically grouped together a number of cultures that were located at the Pontic steppes. This grouping is now considered overly broad, and the "Revised Steppe theory" that focuses specifically on the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamnaya_culture Yamnaya culture]] as the origin of the Indo-European dispersal is believed to be more credible.
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** Her Gimbutas's interpretation of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurgan_hypothesis Kurgan hypothesis]] linguistically grouped together a number of cultures that were located at the Pontic steppes. This grouping is now considered overly broad, and the "Revised Steppe theory" that focuses specifically on the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamnaya_culture Yamnaya culture]] as the origin of the Indo-European dispersal is believed to be more credible.
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* The main inspiration of ''Tras las huellas del hombre rojo'' is the "Ebro Frontier" theory of TheNineties, which claims that the Ebro River delayed the entry of ''H. sapiens'' in the rest of the Iberian Peninsula for about 5,000 years (c. 42,000-37,000 years ago), allowing Neanderthals to continue living there in isolation while disappearing from most of Europe. As of 2020, two archaeological sites from that period have been attributed to ''H. sapiens'', one in Portugal and another in Spain (though both being on the western coast, it is still possible that ''H. sapiens'' reached them by following the northern coast without crossing the river).
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* The main inspiration of ''Tras las huellas del hombre rojo'' is the "Ebro Frontier" theory of TheNineties, which claims that the Ebro River delayed the entry of ''H. sapiens'' in the rest of the Iberian Peninsula for about 5,000 years (c. 42,000-37,000 years ago), allowing Neanderthals to continue living there in isolation while disappearing from most of Europe. As of By 2020, two archaeological sites from that period have been were attributed to ''H. sapiens'', one in Portugal and another in Spain (though both being on the western coast, it is still possible that ''H. sapiens'' reached them by following the northern coast without crossing the river).
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* ''[[Literature/EarthsChildren The Clan of the Cave Bear]]'' based Ayla's leaving flowers on Iza's tomb (and [[BeenThereShapedHistory inventing the custom in the process]]) on a Neanderthal tomb found in Shanidar, Iraq in the 1960s, where clusters of pollen were found around the skeleton (this body, a male who lived to old age despite having an arm amputated in his youth, [[DecompositeCharacter inspired the character of Creb]]). Thirty years later, this pollen was attributed to contamination by archaeologists, or rodents who had nested inside the skeleton after burial. And thirty further years on, more pollen clusters were found that could be explained by an actual burial with flowers. [[AndTheAdventureContinues Allegedly]].
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* ''[[Literature/EarthsChildren The Clan of the Cave Bear]]'' based Ayla's leaving flowers on Iza's tomb (and [[BeenThereShapedHistory inventing the custom in the process]]) on a Neanderthal tomb found in Shanidar, Iraq in the 1960s, where clusters of pollen were found around the skeleton (this body, a male who lived to old age despite having an arm amputated in his youth, [[DecompositeCharacter inspired the character of Creb]]). Thirty years later, this pollen was attributed to contamination by archaeologists, or rodents who that had nested inside the skeleton after burial. And thirty further years on, more pollen clusters were found that could be explained by an actual burial with flowers. [[AndTheAdventureContinues Allegedly]].
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[[folder:Early hominids]]
* ScienceMarchesOn has a subpage for the ''[[ScienceMarchesOn/WalkingWith Walking with...]]'' series, including some changes related to our understanding of human evolution.
* The infamous [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_man Piltdown man]], despite being correctly guessed as a fake the year after its "discovery" and several times afterwards, wasn't completely discredited until four decades later for several reasons. A big one was that many early 20th century people of European descent, including respected scientists, simply couldn't palate that humanity's ancestor could have originated some place other than Europe or its near vicinity, much less DarkestAfrica[[note]]For example, Roy Chapman Andrews, an alleged inspiration for Franchise/IndianaJones, discovered the Gobi dinosaur fossil fields while looking for hominids under the spurious reasoning that mankind must have evolved in a high place with fresh air, and expressly dismissed Africa as a swampy lowland that 'only grows vermin'[[/note]]. Some who knew better were supporters of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eolith eolith theory]], and the Piltdown Man was the only thing to support it, so they kept silent. Finally, the examining methods were still very crude when Piltdown Man was "discovered" but had become far more refined forty years later, and the Piltdown cranial and jaw specimens were kept locked away for decades to preserve them, with virtually no follow-up examination that might have exposed their discrepancies. Believers considered them too priceless to be handled, and any curators with private doubts may not have wanted their origin debunked on ''their'' watch.
** The original model of human evolution, that the brain became advanced first and the body shifted to serve it (e.g. bipedalism as a consequence of using the hands to manipulate objects), was being systematically torn down with every new human ancestor discovered ''except'' Piltdown Man. After its "discovery" it was considered a clinching counter-example, but the reason it was finally re-examined decades later was that by then it was the only one. The theory is supported, along with Piltdown Man, in the BMovie ''Film/TheNeanderthalMan'', released just five months before Piltdown Man was definitely exposed as a hoax. It is also the apparent basis of the prologue to ''Film/TwoThousandOneASpaceOdyssey'' (though WordOfGod is that they intended to depict the man-apes as bipedal, but made them quadrupedal in order to avoid MaleFrontalNudity).
* ''2001: A Space Odyssey'' also references Raymond Dart's theory that ''Australopithecus'' made weapons from bones and used them to hunt big game ("osteodontokeratic industry"). In the following decades, C.K. Brain and others showed that the bone accumulations this idea was based on were actually caused by leopards, and that australopithecines were there as unlucky prey, not hunters.
* The discovery of "Ardi" in 2009, the most complete ''Ardipithecus'' skeleton to date, threw into question many established theories regarding human evolution. The prevailing theory on why humans began walking upright had been that ''Australopithecus'', the first truly bipedal hominid, evolved on the savanna, and being bipedal enabled its ancestors to see further across open landscape, finding food and shelter and spotting predators more easily. However, analysis of Ardi's skeleton indicated that the thick forest-dwelling and one million years older ''Ardipithecus'' was capable of walking upright to at least some degree. The current theory is that bipedalism arose in ''Ardipithecus'' as a means to better navigate dense jungle and underbrush. ''Series/WalkingWithBeasts'', ''Series/WalkingWithCavemen'', and ''A Species Odyssey'' all make reference to the older theory.
* It is a cliché of popular culture to show primitive hominids with hunched backs, [[EvolutionaryLevels intermediate between]] quadrupedal apes and bipedal humans (just see any ParodyOfEvolution), but it's been known since Dart's time that hominids from at least ''Australopithecus'' were completely bipedal, with their neck and back aligned under their head. Nevertheless, both ''Walking with Beasts'' and ''Walking with Cavemen'' show australopithecines attempting to walk on all fours before rising dramatically to show that they are actually bipedal. WordOfGod is that ''Beasts'' [[WhatCouldHaveBeen actually tried to make their]] ''[[WhatCouldHaveBeen Australopithecus]]'' [[WhatCouldHaveBeen less bipedal]], but found impossible to animate their skeletons in such way. Dishonorable mentions go to ''A Species Odyssey'', which actually coached mo-cap actors into walking "imperfectly" to play australopithecines (which paleoartist Mauricio Antón likened to Music/MichaelJackson's dancers in the music video ''Music/{{Thriller}}''), and ''Before we ruled the Earth'' and ''Film/TimeTrap'' for showing even more advanced hominids walking (semi)quadrupedally.
* More than a dozen pre-modern human varieties (Java man, Peking man, etc.) are now believed to have been local breeds of ''[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_erectus#Descendants_and_subspecies Homo erectus]]'' (which may or may not be the ancestors of modern humans) and not actually separate species at all.
[[/folder]]
[[folder:''Homo neanderthalensis'']]
* One of the first complete Neanderthal skeletons discovered is that of a male with a twisted, bent spine, a wasted lower jaw, and a pronounced hunchback. Archaeologists assumed this was a typical Neanderthal skeleton, which led to the popular view of [[AllCavemenWereNeanderthals Neanderthals as hunchbacked, chinless knuckle-draggers]], or outright [[BeastMan beast-men]]. Later analysis indicated, however, that the individual in question was probably well over sixty years old and suffered from severe arthritis and bone wastage (so much for Social Darwinists' pet notion that ancient humans did not take care of the elderly, infirm and sickly but simply left them to die). Most skeletons found since suggest that a Neanderthal would look very similar to a modern human as long as they didn't enter a ''Homo sapiens'' beauty contest. Works referencing the old trope include ''[[Creator/LesterDelRey The Day is Done]]'', ''Literature/TheUglyLittleBoy'', ''The Neanderthal Man'', ''Film/MyScienceProject'', and numerous cartoons from ''ComicStrip/TheFarSide''.
* ''[[Literature/EarthsChildren The Clan of the Cave Bear]]'' based Ayla's leaving flowers on Iza's tomb (and [[BeenThereShapedHistory inventing the custom in the process]]) on a Neanderthal tomb found in Shanidar, Iraq in the 1960s, where clusters of pollen were found around the skeleton (this body, a male who lived to old age despite having an arm amputated in his youth, [[DecompositeCharacter inspired the character of Creb]]). Thirty years later, this pollen was attributed to contamination by archaeologists, or rodents who had nested inside the skeleton after burial. And thirty further years on, more pollen clusters were found that could be explained by an actual burial with flowers. [[AndTheAdventureContinues Allegedly]].
* It was also assumed that Neanderthals couldn't speak, or that their ability to articulate was very limited, because no hyoid bone was found in a Neanderthal skeleton until 1983 (e.g. ''The Day is Done''). Works that wanted to portray them as intelligent, like ''The Clan of the Cave Bear'', had them use [[HandSignals sign language]]. Now, it's even likely that the modern human's version of the FOX P2 gene came from Neanderthals. Studies of their ear canals have also shown that Neanderthals heard on the same frequency as us and unlike chimpanzees or more primitive hominids like ''Australopithecus'', which is also indicative of the use of speech as communication. In retrospect, the notion that Neanderthals could even have lacked a hyoid bone is, in itself, an antiquated one: all other primates and most other tetrapods have such a bone, just not always positioned to permit speech.
** ''The Ugly Little Boy'' was expanded into a novel where one of the doctors goes into a detailed lecture about the hyoid bone. The Neanderthals are portrayed as having a language with [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_consonant click consonants]]; Timmy learns to speak English, but it sounds a little blurry.
* Claims that Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans couldn't interbreed -- or that if they did, their offspring would be short-lived and/or infertile, a source of {{angst}} in ''Literature/EarthsChildren'', ''Literature/TheNeanderthalParallax'', and ''Dance of the Tiger'' -- have been thoroughly disproven with the discovery that most modern humans have a small amount of Neanderthal DNA in them (and in the case of East Asians and Australoids, also Denisovan DNA). As of now, the saving grace of these works is that [[MaleGaze all]] deal with pairings of Neanderthal ''men'' and modern women; for one reason or another, all Neanderthal DNA in modern humans seems to have come from females.
* Fair-haired, light-eyed, and light-skinned ''H. sapiens'' meeting dark-haired, dark-eyed, sometimes dark-skinned ''H. neanderthalensis'', and their [[HumansAreWhite obvious]] UnfortunateImplications. The most notable example may be ''The Clan of the Cave Bear'', but it's not the only one. Even at the time of writing, this was questionable if not illogical, because Cro-Magnons were recent immigrants from Africa while Neanderthals had evolved for hundreds of thousands of years in Europe by that point (this is [[WordOfGod explicitly]] why it's the opposite in ''Dance of the Tiger'', from around the same time). We now have evidence that red hair and green and blue eyes were not uncommon among Neanderthals.
* The idea that Neanderthals disproportionally hunted cave bears and worshipped them in a "[[https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/the-cult-of-the-cave-bear/ cave bear cult]]" loosely similar to the "[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bear_worship bear cults]]" of some northern Eurasian peoples became popular in the mid-20th century after findings of cave bear skull piles at the bottom of caves. Later research showed that the most impressive of such finds in the 1920s was improperly described, and that all supposed human-made piles were just natural accumulations as hibernating cave bears died on top of one another over millennia, but by then it had been referenced by ''The Clan of the Cave Bear'' and ''Literature/EatersOfTheDead''.
** Backlash against this led in part to Neanderthals being characterized as devoid of symbolism and abstraction abilities, making them [[LiteralMinded unable to handle sarcasm]] or [[OutgrownSuchSillySuperstitions have a religion]], as seen in ''Walking with Cavemen'' and the 2005 Spanish prehistoric novel ''Tras las huellas del hombre rojo'' ("On the red man's track"). The other part of the reasoning was that there were no known examples of art associated with Neanderthals... but this changed. Though not without resistance, paleoanthropologists have slowly accepted that Neanderthals, at least in their last millennia, had music made with bone "flutes", decorated themselves with ochre, feathers, and sea shells; and made cave paintings (just fewer and less elaborate than modern humans - for now).
[[/folder]]
[[folder:''Homo sapiens'']]
* The ''Literature/{{Kull}}'' stories are canonically set around 100,000 BC. His homeland is {{Atlantis}} and its geopolitical rival is Lemuria - a sunken landmass first theorized in the mid-19th century to explain the presence of lemur fossils in both Madagascar and India, later assimilated by the UsefulNotes/TheosophicalSociety to the ''Kumari Kandam'' of Tamil legend and identified as the birthplace of the human race. Tales of continents that sunk catastrophically in historical times became definitive bunk when plate tectonics were confirmed in TheSixties.
* The indigenous inhabitants of the Andaman Islands and other isolated parts of South and Southeast Asia were once lumped together into a singular group called the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negrito Negritos.]] Genetic studies have put the kibosh on this idea, showing that they actually consist of several distinct groups.
** Up until 2011, it was generally assumed that the Andamanese peoples were descendants of participants in the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Dispersal Southern Dispersal]], aka the Great Costal Migration, the initial migration out of Africa along the southern coast of Asia between 70,000 and 50,000 BCE. However, genetic studies indicate that the islands remained uninhabited until around 26,000 BCE, and the ancestors of the Andamanese were not directly descended from the first migrants out of Africa.
* The main inspiration of ''Tras las huellas del hombre rojo'' is the "Ebro Frontier" theory of TheNineties, which claims that the Ebro River delayed the entry of ''H. sapiens'' in the rest of the Iberian Peninsula for about 5,000 years (c. 42,000-37,000 years ago), allowing Neanderthals to continue living there in isolation while disappearing from most of Europe. As of 2020, two archaeological sites from that period have been attributed to ''H. sapiens'', one in Portugal and another in Spain (though both being on the western coast, it is still possible that ''H. sapiens'' reached them by following the northern coast without crossing the river).
* As seen in ''[[WesternAnimation/IlEtaitUneFois Once upon a time... the Americas]]'' and ''Series/MonstersWeMet'', the early peopling of the Americas was once thought to have happened in a single dispersal event from Asia when the Ice Age ended around 10,000 years ago, and a corridor appeared between the Cordilleran and Laurentide Ice Sheets, allowing Clovis culture hunter-gatherers to walk between ice-free areas in Alaska and the lower 48, after which sea levels rose to cut the connection between Alaska and Siberia behind them. Later, evidence surfaced of people already living in the Americas 15, 20, or (more disputedly) 30 to 40 thousand years ago. It is now thought that there were at least two main dispersal events, one following the Pacific coast during the Last Glacial Maximum over 20,000 years ago, which may have been done by boat in some parts, and another by Clovis overland around 13,000 years ago that largely replaced the earlier migration leaving only residual genetics in South America. A third, coastal-maritime dispersal beginning around 5,000 years ago originated Arctic peoples like the Inuit, and an enigmatic fourth at some point in the middle may have originated the proposed Dené-Yenisean language family (if it is both correct and not a result of ''back''-migration from North America to Siberia, as some have suggested).
* It was widely believed that all sorts of civilizational developments happened in the Neolithic Revolution and were linked to the rise of agriculture and the transformation of roaming hunters into settled farmers. Weaving textiles or making ceramics are advanced skills and something humans only did when they settled down, right? [[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/790569.stm Wrong.]] The fact that ceramics were older than the Neolithic has been known for some time, but the more recent discovery of the imprints of textiles in said ceramics upends traditional perceptions of the earlier eras of the Stone Age considerably.
* ''The Tribe of the Cliffs'' and ''Earth's Children'' depict dogs and horses being first domesticated around the same time. Later genetic studies firmly established that dogs were domesticated tens of thousands of years earlier than any other animal, and necessarily in a different context to livestock.
* Both ''[[Recap/FuturamaS6E8ThatDarnKatz Futurama]]'' and ''Series/CSICrimeSceneInvestigation'' (in [[Recap/CSIS2E20CatsInTheCradle an episode]] about the [[AlwaysMurder murder]] of a CrazyCatLady) reference the once CommonKnowledge that cats were first domesticated in UsefulNotes/AncientEgypt. However, in the mid-[=2000s=] archaeologists found evidence that cats had been domesticated in the Levant thousand of years before they were in Egypt.
* While it was once generally believed that Europe's Mesolithic "Western Hunter-Gatherers" were displaced by "Early European Farmers" in the Neolithic, genetic studies have painted a more complex picture. There does seem to have been an initial displacement, but the evidence says that after the initial expansion, the two groups co-existed side by side for centuries with ongoing gradual admixture.
* Marija Gimbutas's ''Goddess'' trilogy:
** Her interpretation of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurgan_hypothesis Kurgan hypothesis]] linguistically grouped together a number of cultures that were located at the Pontic steppes. This grouping is now considered overly broad, and the "Revised Steppe theory" that focuses specifically on the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamnaya_culture Yamnaya culture]] as the origin of the Indo-European dispersal is believed to be more credible.
** Her theory of a peaceful and egalitarian gynocentric Old Europe being replaced by the more warlike and hierarchical Indo-Europeans who made Europe significantly more patriarchal than it had been before has been contradicted by the discovery of Neolithic European hillforts, along with evidence that adult males were given preferential treatment in burial rites.
* Soviet historian and linguist Nikolai Marr developed the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japhetic_theory Japhetic theory]], claiming that the Kartvelian languages of the South Caucasus are related to Semitic languages, from which he extrapolated that the Caucasian and Afro-Asiatic languages (along with the Basque language) share a common root, also claiming that "Japhetic languages" had been spoken throughout Europe before the advent of the Indo-Europeans. While the Soviet government promoted this theory at first in an attempt to apply Marxist theories of class struggle to linguistics, they began rejecting it in the mid-twentieth century, and it is now considered deeply flawed both inside and outside the former Soviet Union.
* ''Literature/TheLightOfOtherDays'' has a researcher use the [[{{Chronoscope}} Wormcam]] to find that "[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi Ötzi the Iceman]]" was a hunter who went too far into the mountains in pursuit of prey and died of hypothermia. The year after the novel was published, an arrowhead was found embedded in his shoulder. Later DNA of different men was found on him and his belongings, all but confirming that he was chased up there by a group that fought and killed him. Some old documentaries also depict him as a bald man purely because his mummy looks bald, but this is now known to be an artifact of decomposition. He actually had a full head of hair and a beard when he died.
* A popular belief in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries was that Europeans could be divided into two groups: "fair" Europeans from the north, known for rationality, intelligence, hard work, and integrity, and "swarthy" Europeans from the south, known for laziness, dishonesty, greed, and stupidity. [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism Scientific racists]] later subdivided the swarthy Europeans into Mediterraneans and Alpines, the first of which was said to be creatively BrilliantButLazy and shiftless, and the second stupid, plodding peasants. Despite the skepticism of mainstream anthropologists and historians, the Nordic "master race" theory became a cornerstone of Nazism. Less horrifically, it also shows up in much of the fiction of the time: ''Franchise/ConanTheBarbarian'' might be the best-known example. Of course, we now know that Nordicism is bunk: not only do we now know that "Nordics" did not arise in Scandinavia (which was the last area of Continental Europe to be peopled), but also that the various "fair" Northern Europeans aren't particularly closely related to each other. Skin color and pigmentation variations are recent and can't be used to indicate relatedness. Case in point, black Africans were once all lumped together as being essentially the same, with the exception of obvious outliers like the Khoisan and African pygmies; genetic studies have since shown that they're far more heterogenous (biologically speaking) than previously thought, certainly moreso than Europeans.
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* ScienceMarchesOn has a subpage for the ''[[ScienceMarchesOn/WalkingWith Walking with...]]'' series, including some changes related to our understanding of human evolution.
* The infamous [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_man Piltdown man]], despite being correctly guessed as a fake the year after its "discovery" and several times afterwards, wasn't completely discredited until four decades later for several reasons. A big one was that many early 20th century people of European descent, including respected scientists, simply couldn't palate that humanity's ancestor could have originated some place other than Europe or its near vicinity, much less DarkestAfrica[[note]]For example, Roy Chapman Andrews, an alleged inspiration for Franchise/IndianaJones, discovered the Gobi dinosaur fossil fields while looking for hominids under the spurious reasoning that mankind must have evolved in a high place with fresh air, and expressly dismissed Africa as a swampy lowland that 'only grows vermin'[[/note]]. Some who knew better were supporters of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eolith eolith theory]], and the Piltdown Man was the only thing to support it, so they kept silent. Finally, the examining methods were still very crude when Piltdown Man was "discovered" but had become far more refined forty years later, and the Piltdown cranial and jaw specimens were kept locked away for decades to preserve them, with virtually no follow-up examination that might have exposed their discrepancies. Believers considered them too priceless to be handled, and any curators with private doubts may not have wanted their origin debunked on ''their'' watch.
** The original model of human evolution, that the brain became advanced first and the body shifted to serve it (e.g. bipedalism as a consequence of using the hands to manipulate objects), was being systematically torn down with every new human ancestor discovered ''except'' Piltdown Man. After its "discovery" it was considered a clinching counter-example, but the reason it was finally re-examined decades later was that by then it was the only one. The theory is supported, along with Piltdown Man, in the BMovie ''Film/TheNeanderthalMan'', released just five months before Piltdown Man was definitely exposed as a hoax. It is also the apparent basis of the prologue to ''Film/TwoThousandOneASpaceOdyssey'' (though WordOfGod is that they intended to depict the man-apes as bipedal, but made them quadrupedal in order to avoid MaleFrontalNudity).
* ''2001: A Space Odyssey'' also references Raymond Dart's theory that ''Australopithecus'' made weapons from bones and used them to hunt big game ("osteodontokeratic industry"). In the following decades, C.K. Brain and others showed that the bone accumulations this idea was based on were actually caused by leopards, and that australopithecines were there as unlucky prey, not hunters.
* The discovery of "Ardi" in 2009, the most complete ''Ardipithecus'' skeleton to date, threw into question many established theories regarding human evolution. The prevailing theory on why humans began walking upright had been that ''Australopithecus'', the first truly bipedal hominid, evolved on the savanna, and being bipedal enabled its ancestors to see further across open landscape, finding food and shelter and spotting predators more easily. However, analysis of Ardi's skeleton indicated that the thick forest-dwelling and one million years older ''Ardipithecus'' was capable of walking upright to at least some degree. The current theory is that bipedalism arose in ''Ardipithecus'' as a means to better navigate dense jungle and underbrush. ''Series/WalkingWithBeasts'', ''Series/WalkingWithCavemen'', and ''A Species Odyssey'' all make reference to the older theory.
* It is a cliché of popular culture to show primitive hominids with hunched backs, [[EvolutionaryLevels intermediate between]] quadrupedal apes and bipedal humans (just see any ParodyOfEvolution), but it's been known since Dart's time that hominids from at least ''Australopithecus'' were completely bipedal, with their neck and back aligned under their head. Nevertheless, both ''Walking with Beasts'' and ''Walking with Cavemen'' show australopithecines attempting to walk on all fours before rising dramatically to show that they are actually bipedal. WordOfGod is that ''Beasts'' [[WhatCouldHaveBeen actually tried to make their]] ''[[WhatCouldHaveBeen Australopithecus]]'' [[WhatCouldHaveBeen less bipedal]], but found impossible to animate their skeletons in such way. Dishonorable mentions go to ''A Species Odyssey'', which actually coached mo-cap actors into walking "imperfectly" to play australopithecines (which paleoartist Mauricio Antón likened to Music/MichaelJackson's dancers in the music video ''Music/{{Thriller}}''), and ''Before we ruled the Earth'' and ''Film/TimeTrap'' for showing even more advanced hominids walking (semi)quadrupedally.
* More than a dozen pre-modern human varieties (Java man, Peking man, etc.) are now believed to have been local breeds of ''[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_erectus#Descendants_and_subspecies Homo erectus]]'' (which may or may not be the ancestors of modern humans) and not actually separate species at all.
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[[folder:''Homo neanderthalensis'']]
* One of the first complete Neanderthal skeletons discovered is that of a male with a twisted, bent spine, a wasted lower jaw, and a pronounced hunchback. Archaeologists assumed this was a typical Neanderthal skeleton, which led to the popular view of [[AllCavemenWereNeanderthals Neanderthals as hunchbacked, chinless knuckle-draggers]], or outright [[BeastMan beast-men]]. Later analysis indicated, however, that the individual in question was probably well over sixty years old and suffered from severe arthritis and bone wastage (so much for Social Darwinists' pet notion that ancient humans did not take care of the elderly, infirm and sickly but simply left them to die). Most skeletons found since suggest that a Neanderthal would look very similar to a modern human as long as they didn't enter a ''Homo sapiens'' beauty contest. Works referencing the old trope include ''[[Creator/LesterDelRey The Day is Done]]'', ''Literature/TheUglyLittleBoy'', ''The Neanderthal Man'', ''Film/MyScienceProject'', and numerous cartoons from ''ComicStrip/TheFarSide''.
* ''[[Literature/EarthsChildren The Clan of the Cave Bear]]'' based Ayla's leaving flowers on Iza's tomb (and [[BeenThereShapedHistory inventing the custom in the process]]) on a Neanderthal tomb found in Shanidar, Iraq in the 1960s, where clusters of pollen were found around the skeleton (this body, a male who lived to old age despite having an arm amputated in his youth, [[DecompositeCharacter inspired the character of Creb]]). Thirty years later, this pollen was attributed to contamination by archaeologists, or rodents who had nested inside the skeleton after burial. And thirty further years on, more pollen clusters were found that could be explained by an actual burial with flowers. [[AndTheAdventureContinues Allegedly]].
* It was also assumed that Neanderthals couldn't speak, or that their ability to articulate was very limited, because no hyoid bone was found in a Neanderthal skeleton until 1983 (e.g. ''The Day is Done''). Works that wanted to portray them as intelligent, like ''The Clan of the Cave Bear'', had them use [[HandSignals sign language]]. Now, it's even likely that the modern human's version of the FOX P2 gene came from Neanderthals. Studies of their ear canals have also shown that Neanderthals heard on the same frequency as us and unlike chimpanzees or more primitive hominids like ''Australopithecus'', which is also indicative of the use of speech as communication. In retrospect, the notion that Neanderthals could even have lacked a hyoid bone is, in itself, an antiquated one: all other primates and most other tetrapods have such a bone, just not always positioned to permit speech.
** ''The Ugly Little Boy'' was expanded into a novel where one of the doctors goes into a detailed lecture about the hyoid bone. The Neanderthals are portrayed as having a language with [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_consonant click consonants]]; Timmy learns to speak English, but it sounds a little blurry.
* Claims that Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans couldn't interbreed -- or that if they did, their offspring would be short-lived and/or infertile, a source of {{angst}} in ''Literature/EarthsChildren'', ''Literature/TheNeanderthalParallax'', and ''Dance of the Tiger'' -- have been thoroughly disproven with the discovery that most modern humans have a small amount of Neanderthal DNA in them (and in the case of East Asians and Australoids, also Denisovan DNA). As of now, the saving grace of these works is that [[MaleGaze all]] deal with pairings of Neanderthal ''men'' and modern women; for one reason or another, all Neanderthal DNA in modern humans seems to have come from females.
* Fair-haired, light-eyed, and light-skinned ''H. sapiens'' meeting dark-haired, dark-eyed, sometimes dark-skinned ''H. neanderthalensis'', and their [[HumansAreWhite obvious]] UnfortunateImplications. The most notable example may be ''The Clan of the Cave Bear'', but it's not the only one. Even at the time of writing, this was questionable if not illogical, because Cro-Magnons were recent immigrants from Africa while Neanderthals had evolved for hundreds of thousands of years in Europe by that point (this is [[WordOfGod explicitly]] why it's the opposite in ''Dance of the Tiger'', from around the same time). We now have evidence that red hair and green and blue eyes were not uncommon among Neanderthals.
* The idea that Neanderthals disproportionally hunted cave bears and worshipped them in a "[[https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/the-cult-of-the-cave-bear/ cave bear cult]]" loosely similar to the "[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bear_worship bear cults]]" of some northern Eurasian peoples became popular in the mid-20th century after findings of cave bear skull piles at the bottom of caves. Later research showed that the most impressive of such finds in the 1920s was improperly described, and that all supposed human-made piles were just natural accumulations as hibernating cave bears died on top of one another over millennia, but by then it had been referenced by ''The Clan of the Cave Bear'' and ''Literature/EatersOfTheDead''.
** Backlash against this led in part to Neanderthals being characterized as devoid of symbolism and abstraction abilities, making them [[LiteralMinded unable to handle sarcasm]] or [[OutgrownSuchSillySuperstitions have a religion]], as seen in ''Walking with Cavemen'' and the 2005 Spanish prehistoric novel ''Tras las huellas del hombre rojo'' ("On the red man's track"). The other part of the reasoning was that there were no known examples of art associated with Neanderthals... but this changed. Though not without resistance, paleoanthropologists have slowly accepted that Neanderthals, at least in their last millennia, had music made with bone "flutes", decorated themselves with ochre, feathers, and sea shells; and made cave paintings (just fewer and less elaborate than modern humans - for now).
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[[folder:''Homo sapiens'']]
* The ''Literature/{{Kull}}'' stories are canonically set around 100,000 BC. His homeland is {{Atlantis}} and its geopolitical rival is Lemuria - a sunken landmass first theorized in the mid-19th century to explain the presence of lemur fossils in both Madagascar and India, later assimilated by the UsefulNotes/TheosophicalSociety to the ''Kumari Kandam'' of Tamil legend and identified as the birthplace of the human race. Tales of continents that sunk catastrophically in historical times became definitive bunk when plate tectonics were confirmed in TheSixties.
* The indigenous inhabitants of the Andaman Islands and other isolated parts of South and Southeast Asia were once lumped together into a singular group called the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negrito Negritos.]] Genetic studies have put the kibosh on this idea, showing that they actually consist of several distinct groups.
** Up until 2011, it was generally assumed that the Andamanese peoples were descendants of participants in the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Dispersal Southern Dispersal]], aka the Great Costal Migration, the initial migration out of Africa along the southern coast of Asia between 70,000 and 50,000 BCE. However, genetic studies indicate that the islands remained uninhabited until around 26,000 BCE, and the ancestors of the Andamanese were not directly descended from the first migrants out of Africa.
* The main inspiration of ''Tras las huellas del hombre rojo'' is the "Ebro Frontier" theory of TheNineties, which claims that the Ebro River delayed the entry of ''H. sapiens'' in the rest of the Iberian Peninsula for about 5,000 years (c. 42,000-37,000 years ago), allowing Neanderthals to continue living there in isolation while disappearing from most of Europe. As of 2020, two archaeological sites from that period have been attributed to ''H. sapiens'', one in Portugal and another in Spain (though both being on the western coast, it is still possible that ''H. sapiens'' reached them by following the northern coast without crossing the river).
* As seen in ''[[WesternAnimation/IlEtaitUneFois Once upon a time... the Americas]]'' and ''Series/MonstersWeMet'', the early peopling of the Americas was once thought to have happened in a single dispersal event from Asia when the Ice Age ended around 10,000 years ago, and a corridor appeared between the Cordilleran and Laurentide Ice Sheets, allowing Clovis culture hunter-gatherers to walk between ice-free areas in Alaska and the lower 48, after which sea levels rose to cut the connection between Alaska and Siberia behind them. Later, evidence surfaced of people already living in the Americas 15, 20, or (more disputedly) 30 to 40 thousand years ago. It is now thought that there were at least two main dispersal events, one following the Pacific coast during the Last Glacial Maximum over 20,000 years ago, which may have been done by boat in some parts, and another by Clovis overland around 13,000 years ago that largely replaced the earlier migration leaving only residual genetics in South America. A third, coastal-maritime dispersal beginning around 5,000 years ago originated Arctic peoples like the Inuit, and an enigmatic fourth at some point in the middle may have originated the proposed Dené-Yenisean language family (if it is both correct and not a result of ''back''-migration from North America to Siberia, as some have suggested).
* It was widely believed that all sorts of civilizational developments happened in the Neolithic Revolution and were linked to the rise of agriculture and the transformation of roaming hunters into settled farmers. Weaving textiles or making ceramics are advanced skills and something humans only did when they settled down, right? [[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/790569.stm Wrong.]] The fact that ceramics were older than the Neolithic has been known for some time, but the more recent discovery of the imprints of textiles in said ceramics upends traditional perceptions of the earlier eras of the Stone Age considerably.
* ''The Tribe of the Cliffs'' and ''Earth's Children'' depict dogs and horses being first domesticated around the same time. Later genetic studies firmly established that dogs were domesticated tens of thousands of years earlier than any other animal, and necessarily in a different context to livestock.
* Both ''[[Recap/FuturamaS6E8ThatDarnKatz Futurama]]'' and ''Series/CSICrimeSceneInvestigation'' (in [[Recap/CSIS2E20CatsInTheCradle an episode]] about the [[AlwaysMurder murder]] of a CrazyCatLady) reference the once CommonKnowledge that cats were first domesticated in UsefulNotes/AncientEgypt. However, in the mid-[=2000s=] archaeologists found evidence that cats had been domesticated in the Levant thousand of years before they were in Egypt.
* While it was once generally believed that Europe's Mesolithic "Western Hunter-Gatherers" were displaced by "Early European Farmers" in the Neolithic, genetic studies have painted a more complex picture. There does seem to have been an initial displacement, but the evidence says that after the initial expansion, the two groups co-existed side by side for centuries with ongoing gradual admixture.
* Marija Gimbutas's ''Goddess'' trilogy:
** Her interpretation of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurgan_hypothesis Kurgan hypothesis]] linguistically grouped together a number of cultures that were located at the Pontic steppes. This grouping is now considered overly broad, and the "Revised Steppe theory" that focuses specifically on the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamnaya_culture Yamnaya culture]] as the origin of the Indo-European dispersal is believed to be more credible.
** Her theory of a peaceful and egalitarian gynocentric Old Europe being replaced by the more warlike and hierarchical Indo-Europeans who made Europe significantly more patriarchal than it had been before has been contradicted by the discovery of Neolithic European hillforts, along with evidence that adult males were given preferential treatment in burial rites.
* Soviet historian and linguist Nikolai Marr developed the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japhetic_theory Japhetic theory]], claiming that the Kartvelian languages of the South Caucasus are related to Semitic languages, from which he extrapolated that the Caucasian and Afro-Asiatic languages (along with the Basque language) share a common root, also claiming that "Japhetic languages" had been spoken throughout Europe before the advent of the Indo-Europeans. While the Soviet government promoted this theory at first in an attempt to apply Marxist theories of class struggle to linguistics, they began rejecting it in the mid-twentieth century, and it is now considered deeply flawed both inside and outside the former Soviet Union.
* ''Literature/TheLightOfOtherDays'' has a researcher use the [[{{Chronoscope}} Wormcam]] to find that "[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi Ötzi the Iceman]]" was a hunter who went too far into the mountains in pursuit of prey and died of hypothermia. The year after the novel was published, an arrowhead was found embedded in his shoulder. Later DNA of different men was found on him and his belongings, all but confirming that he was chased up there by a group that fought and killed him. Some old documentaries also depict him as a bald man purely because his mummy looks bald, but this is now known to be an artifact of decomposition. He actually had a full head of hair and a beard when he died.
* A popular belief in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries was that Europeans could be divided into two groups: "fair" Europeans from the north, known for rationality, intelligence, hard work, and integrity, and "swarthy" Europeans from the south, known for laziness, dishonesty, greed, and stupidity. [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism Scientific racists]] later subdivided the swarthy Europeans into Mediterraneans and Alpines, the first of which was said to be creatively BrilliantButLazy and shiftless, and the second stupid, plodding peasants. Despite the skepticism of mainstream anthropologists and historians, the Nordic "master race" theory became a cornerstone of Nazism. Less horrifically, it also shows up in much of the fiction of the time: ''Franchise/ConanTheBarbarian'' might be the best-known example. Of course, we now know that Nordicism is bunk: not only do we now know that "Nordics" did not arise in Scandinavia (which was the last area of Continental Europe to be peopled), but also that the various "fair" Northern Europeans aren't particularly closely related to each other. Skin color and pigmentation variations are recent and can't be used to indicate relatedness. Case in point, black Africans were once all lumped together as being essentially the same, with the exception of obvious outliers like the Khoisan and African pygmies; genetic studies have since shown that they're far more heterogenous (biologically speaking) than previously thought, certainly moreso than Europeans.
[[/folder]]
